HUMILITY
116traditions as a state of character in which
one compares oneself against God and
finds oneself lacking. Such proper recog-
nition of human limits through appeal to
the distinction between the finite and the
infinite, the human and the divine, is at
the heart of religious self-knowledge, and
versions of the virtue thus understood
can be found in writings from Augustine
to Aquinas, and from Bernard of Clair-
vaux to Ignatius Loyola.
Yet such comparisons of oneself to
God can lead also to apparently unseemly
states of character, as for example, when
Ignatius Loyola asserts that, to be
humble, one must recognize oneself as
“foul,” or as “wounds” or “ulcers” who are
worthy of nothing. Furthermore, prob-
lems can arise about how to understand
one’s worth vis à vis other persons on the
basis of this comparison with the divine.
On the one hand, comparison of oneself
to the divine seems to be the great equal-
izing force in human relations: if I am less
worthy than a divine being, then so too
are all other humans. We are all thus in
the same boat, worth-wise. Yet the history
of humility shows, on the other hand, that
a comparison of oneself with the divine
becomes associated with comparing one-
self unfavorably against other persons.
So, Bernard of Clairvaux asserts that the
humble person considers himself inferior
to other persons as well as to God, and
St. Benedict says similarly in his Rule that
the humble person should consider himself
lower and of less worth than other people,
comparing oneself even to a worm.
Because of such problems that arise
when trying to make sense of a virtue
centered on appreciating one’s own limits,
humility has thus also been vigorously
rejected. David Hume, most famously,
accuses it of being a “monkish” virtue that
has no utility and that should, therefore,
be excised from the catalogue of virtues.
Images of false humility, such as Uriah
Heep in David Copperfield, only encour-
age us to this Humean abandonment of
humility as a virtue.
Nonetheless, there have also been
recent efforts to re-conceptualize this
virtue in a way that avoids the excesses
of earlier versions of it. Recent, secular
accounts of it suggest that humility is
simply the virtue of proper self-knowl-
edge, a state in which I accurately under-
stand both my capacities and my limits.
Such awareness is, furthermore, achieved
for some not so much by a human / divine
comparison, but by honest comparison
of oneself with other persons. Some of
these theorists, keen to avoid the prob-
lematic Christian history of the virtue,
even seek instead to associate this proper
self-knowledge more with Aristotelian
magnanimity: a proper self-knowledge of
someone who genuinely has flaws would
encourage something more akin to tradi-
tional accounts of humility; but the
proper self-knowledge of someone who
really had no flaws and was in fact a per-
fectly moral person would look more like
Aristotle’s magnanimous man who knows
his worth and knows how to treat himself
and other persons in light of that fact.